Happy 5th Birthday Nyah - She gets to make her own Birthday Cake!

As a special treat, I let Nyah do everything from cracking the eggs, to putting on the icing for her 5th birthday cake. She loved getting to be a big girl, "for real" as she would say. It was strawberry with strawberry icing - her favorite!

Reminiscent of Uncle Matt:)

The moral of this story, don't leave the eggs too close to the counter! I really think my mom has a similar picture of my brother Matt around the age of 2 (or it's just etched in my mind). Although they both look guilty here, Keira is the culprit. It was totally worth losing nearly a dozen eggs for a great memory:)

The Eye of Storm - Hurricane Ike in Humble

In Mid-September, Hurricane Ike ripped through the Galveston, Houston area. We decided to stay in town even though it looked like the storm could pass right over us. Good friends of ours, Aubrey (9 mths pregnant) and her daughters, Avery and Rylan stayed with us since her husband was living in China. We all nestled away in our bedroom and put the girls on an air matrress in our closet (no windows there). Everything was going great...then the power went out:)...before the storm even made it's way to our house! As the evening went on the ripping winds against our windows were slightly terrifying. Fortunately the girls slept through most of the storm. I barely slept a wink till the eye came through. The picture in the right above shows us in the eye. It was eery to go from raging winds to complete calm. I don't know that I'll ever experience that again because I will probably leave town next time one looks like it's heading our way. We finally slept from about 6am to 8:30am. This was the back half of the storm. The next couple weeks our Humble area was in disarray. A couple families stayed with us in the evenings as they had no power for up to 15 days. It was an experience, but not one I'd like to go through again:)

Nyah begins her last year of Preschool!

Ready, set, go...it's Nyah's first day of her last year of preschool! She is definitely ready. I'm so glad to have her at home another year!